Thursday, February 28, 2013

Lessons From Renewal Process Should Spur Further Reforms

February 28, 2013

(Washington,
DC) – Bipartisan efforts to ensure the safety of all domestic violence
victims should continue following the vote in Congress on February 28,
2013, to renew the Violence against Women Act (VAWA), Human Rights Watch
said today. The bill includes provisions aimed at improving access to
justice and services for victims from a range of backgrounds, and
continuing efforts should include advancing protections for immigrant
victims of violence during the process of comprehensive immigration
reform, Human Rights Watch said. The bill passed by the House
of Representatives addresses gaps in access to justice for victims of
violence on Native American reservations. It includes protections
against discrimination for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender
(LGBT) victims, and modestly expands protections for immigrant victims.
Efforts to renew VAWA in the last Congress stalled over differences
between the House and the Senate on these issues. “Congress came together today and put partisan politics aside to protect victims of violence,” said Meghan Rhoad,
women’s rights researcher at Human Rights Watch. “With continued
cooperation, Congress can make further strides to ensure that everyone
has access to justice, to services, and to safety.” VAWA is the
primary federal law providing legal protection and services to counter
domestic abuse, sexual violence, and stalking. Congress has reauthorized
VAWA twice since it originally passed in 1994. The Senate passed S. 47,
a bipartisan bill to renew VAWA, with 78 votes on February 12. The
House approved S. 47 with a vote of 286 to 138. The House took the vote
after rejecting another bill that would have watered down protections
for victims, Human Rights Watch said. The bill passed by the
House addresses the jurisdictional issues that make it difficult to hold
non-Native American men accountable for violence committed against
Native American women. The bill would restore Native American tribal
courts’ jurisdiction in such cases if domestic violence and dating
violence crimes are committed on tribal lands. Currently, neither state
nor tribal authorities have jurisdiction in such cases. The federal
government has jurisdiction but often does not make prosecuting
misdemeanor domestic violence and dating violence offenses a priority.

Soldier admits guilt in lesser crimes that carry up to 20 years in prison while denying most serious charges against him

Bradley Manning has pleaded guilty to having been the source of the massive WikiLeaks
dump of US state secrets, though he has denied the most serious charge
against him that he "aided the enemy" that could see him languishing in
military prison for the rest of his life.

Through his lawyer,
David Coombs, the soldier pleaded guilty to 10 lesser charges that
included possessing and wilfully communicating to an unauthorised person
all the main elements of the WikiLeaks disclosure. That covered the
so-called "collateral murder" video of an Apache helicopter attack in
Iraq; some US diplomatic cables including one of the early WikiLeaks
publications the Reykjavik cable; portions of the Iraq and Afghanistan
warlogs, some of the files on detainees in Guantanamo; and two
intelligence memos.

These lesser charges each carry a two-year maximum sentence, committing Manning to a possible upper limit of 20 years in prison.

Manning
also pleaded not guilty to 12 counts which relate to the major offences
of which he is accused by the US government. Specifically, he pleaded
not guilty to "aiding the enemy" – the idea that he knowingly gave help
to al-Qaida and in a separate count that by causing secret intelligence
to be published on the internet he knowingly made it accessible to the
enemy.

He also denied that at the time he made the transmission of
information to WikiLeaks he had "reason to believe such information
could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation".

With
Manning having pleaded not guilty to these overarching charges, the
prosecution is now almost certain to press ahead to a full court-martial
which is currently set for 3 June. The judge has indicated that the
trial could run for 12 weeks, although Manning's guilty plea to the
lesser charges may short-circuit the process as the government will no
longer have to prove that he acquired and communicated the trove of
classified material to WikiLeaks.

From The Dallas Morning News:http://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/latest-columns/20130226-emily-bazelon-bullyings-lasting-impact.eceEmily Bazelon26 February 2013A
significant new study from Duke provides the best evidence we’ve had
thus far that bullying in childhood is linked to a higher risk of
psychological disorders in adulthood. The results came as a surprise to
the research team. “I was a skeptic going into this,” author and Duke
psychiatry professor William Copeland said about the claim that bullying
does measurable long-term psychological harm. “To be honest, I was
completely surprised by the strength of the findings.”

I’m less surprised, because as I explain in my new book about bullying, Sticks and Stones,
earlier research has shown that bullying increases the risk for many
problems, including low academic performance in school and depression
(for both bullies and victims) and criminal activity later in life (for
bullies). But the Duke study is important because it lasted 20 years and
followed 1,270 children into adulthood. Beginning at the ages of 9, 11
and 13, the kids were interviewed annually until the age of 16, along
with their parents, and then multiple times over the years following.

Based
on the findings, Copeland and his team divided their subjects into
three groups: people who were victims as children, people who were
bullies and people who were both. The third group is known as
bully-victims. These are the people who tend to have the most serious
psychological problems as kids, and in the Duke study, they also showed
up with higher levels of anxiety, depressive disorders and suicidal
thinking as adults. The people who had only experienced being victims
were also at heightened risk for depression and anxiety. And the bullies
were more likely to have an antisocial personality disorder.

The
researchers also checked to see if the variation could be attributed to
differences in socioeconomic status, or family dysfunction/instability,
or maltreatment (which they defined as physical or sexual abuse). All
three groups had higher rates of family hardship than the kids who
didn’t experience bullying. For the victims, the risk of anxiety
disorders remained strong even when taking into account family problems,
though the risk of depression did not. For bully-victims, the risk of
both anxiety and depression held, and for bullies, the risk of
antisocial personality disorder did as well. In other words, these
results suggest that bullying scars people whether they grow up in a
home with two functional parents or with frequent arguing, not much
parental supervision, divorce, separation or downright abuse or neglect.
It’s a finding that’s in line with other work.

I
am so tired of “I choose my choice” feminism. So, so tired of it. I
just can’t have another fight about whether it’s possible to be a
stay-at-home mom, shave your legs, wear makeup, date men, have rough
sex, have submissive sex, change your name, watch porn, worship a
Judeo-Christian God, shop at Wal-Mart, wear hijab, get breast implants,
listen to hip-hop, go on a diet, eat meat, or wash the dishes and be a
feminist at the same time.

Let’s stop choosing our choices and start choosing our battles.

Choosing
is passive. Choosing is not enough. Choosing devolves into
finger-pointing, into holier-than-thou posturing, into casting feminism
as some kind of private mental exercise, rather than a powerful force
for social change. No one person is making all the right feminist
choices, but so many people are fighting good fights.

Choose-your-choice
feminism brought us, for example, the so-called Mommy Wars, which pits
women against each other, instead of against anti-family work policies
and the intersecting mechanics of economic oppression; it pits a very
small group of “each others,” usually deeply privileged “each others”
against those “each others” who blessedly have the option of choosing at
all.

Choose-your-choice feminism implies that all women already
have the full spectrum of choices available to them in the first place.
Choose-your-choice feminism is for people who don’t play the long game,
or who are so blinded by their own privilege that they no longer see the
need to. Choose-your-choice feminism is for people who think the fight
is over.

In
what would be an epic cave in and an epic victory for women across the
country, House Republicans are preparing to bring the Senate version of
the Violence Against Women Act to the floor for a full vote.Talking Points Memo reports
that late Tuesday night, the Rules Committee “sent the House GOP’s
version of the Violence Against Women Act to the floor with a key
caveat: if that legislation fails, then the Senate-passed version will
get an up-or-down vote.”

Over the next two days, it is expected
that House Republicans will bring their version of VAWA to the floor for
a vote where it will likely die. Then out of the ashes of that bill,
the beefed up Senate version of the bill will rise and be passed by a
coalition of Democrats and sane Republicans. In other words, moderate
Republicans are going to ignore the Tea Party caucus of the House to do
the right thing for women.

Renewal of the legislation had been
hoped for last year, but House Republicans refused to bring the Senate
version of the bill to a vote and it died when the 112th Congress came
to an end. Republicans objected to new protections in the bill for
undocumented immigrants, Native Americans, and same-sex partners. The
Senate then returned for the 2013 session and promptly passed the
strengthened version again by a vote of 78-22. Republicans accounted for
the 22 opposing votes while Democrats and a combination of moderate
Republicans pushed the bill to victory. Every woman in the Senate voted
in support of the bill. And now the bill looks to be finally passed in
the House complete with the new protections.

Senator Patty Murray of Washington told TPM that she praises these new developments in the debate on the bill.

“We
are on the cusp of a huge victory for every single woman who has been
told over the past 16 months that they didn’t deserve VAWA protections. I
applaud those moderate Republicans in the House who are ready to put
politics aside and help us get this over the finish line. I know that
the broad coalition of women and advocates who I’ve worked with over the
course of this long effort have their fingers crossed and will be
watching closely.”

The
wealth gap between white and African-American households almost tripled
within the past 25 years according to a study released on Wednesday by
Brandeis University.

The study,
(PDF) conducted by the university’s Institute on Assets and Social
Policy, tracked 1,700 working-age households between 1984 and 2009 and
concluded that the disparity between white and black families went from
$85,000 to $236,500 during that period.

According to the study,
there was “little evidence” that commonly-held perceptions about
personal choices and behaviors held true when it came to measuring the
ability to accumulate wealth.

“In my estimation, policies and
institutional practices are the main story,” said the institute’s
director, Tom Shapiro, who was the principal author of the report,
during an online seminar on Wednesday.

Instead, the study pointed
to what researchers described as “the configuration of both
opportunities and barriers in workplaces, schools, and communities that
reinforce deeply entrenched racial dynamics in how wealth is accumulated
and that continue to permeate the most important spheres of everyday
life.”

by Norman SolomonPublished on Wednesday, February 27, 2013 by Common DreamsFor the social compact of the United States, most of the Congressional Progressive Caucus has gone missing.

While
still on the caucus roster, three-quarters of the 70-member caucus seem
lost in political smog. Those 54 members of the Progressive Caucus
haven’t signed the current letter that makes a vital commitment: “we
will vote against any and every cut to Medicare, Medicaid, or Social
Security benefits -- including raising the retirement age or cutting the
cost of living adjustments that our constituents earned and need.”

More
than 10 days ago, Congressmen Alan Grayson and Mark Takano initiated
the forthright letter, circulating it among House colleagues. Addressed
to President Obama, the letter has enabled members of Congress to take a
historic stand: joining together in a public pledge not to vote for any
cuts in Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid.

The Grayson-Takano
letter is a breath of fresh progressive air, blowing away the customary
fog that hangs over such matters on Capitol Hill.

The Progressive
Caucus co-chairs, Raul Grijalva and Keith Ellison, signed the letter.
So did Barbara Lee, the caucus whip. But no signer can be found among
the five vice chairs of the Progressive Caucus: Judy Chu, David
Cicilline, Michael Honda, Sheila Jackson-Lee and Jan Schakowsky. The
letter’s current list of signers includes just 16 members of the
Progressive Caucus (along with five other House signers who aren’t part
of the caucus).

What about the other 54 members of the Progressive
Caucus? Their absence from the letter is a clear message to the Obama
White House, which has repeatedly declared its desire to cut the Social
Security cost of living adjustment as well as Medicare. In effect, those
54 non-signers are signaling: Mr. President, we call ourselves
“progressive” but we are unwilling to stick our necks out by challenging
you in defense of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid; we want some
wiggle room that you can exploit.

“It was unreal, unbelievable, almost
shocking, for a member of the court to use certain language,” he said “I
can see politicians and even members of Congress–it is just appalling
to me.”

For Lewis, the comments were especially offensive because
he knows from experience how hard he and others fought to win those
rights. He was severely beaten by Alabama state troopers as he marched
across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Al., on March 7, 1965, a date
that’s now known as Bloody Sunday.

“It is an affront to all of
what the civil rights movement stood for, what people died for, what
people bled for, and those of us who marched across that bridge 48 years
ago, we didn’t march for some racial entitlement,” he said. “We wanted
to open up the political process, and let all of the people come in, and
it didn’t matter whether they were black or white, Latino,
Asian-American or Native American.”

Reverend Al Sharpton, who was also in the court, called Scalia’s words “shocking.”

“How
is that an entitlement?” Sharpton asked. “I thought African-Americans
were citizens! For us to have the right to vote protected is some kind
of entitlement program?”

Lewis agreed, calling the right to vote
“precious, almost sacred. It is the most powerful nonviolent instrument
that we have in a democratic society. And if the courts come to that
point where they declare this section, section 5 of the Voting Rights
Act, unconstitutional, it would be a dagger in the heart of the
democratic process.”

If the Scalia wing strikes down the Voting Rights Act, it thinks we're beyond our history of racial bias

This
morning, the Supreme Court heard arguments regarding the
constitutionality of the pre-clearance provisions of the Voting Rights
Act, which require certain states with a history of disenfranchising
African-American voters to have any changes in their law regulating
voting to be approved by the Department of Justice first.

Most
observers expect the court to declare those provisions unconstitutional,
even though they were extended by the Senate by a unanimous vote less
than seven years ago, while facing only token opposition in the House.
All in all, 488 of 521 members of Congress voted to renew the
pre-clearance provisions.

The enthusiasm with which the court’s
righter wing appears to be greeting constitutional attacks on provisions
adopted and renewed by overwhelming legislative majorities could make a
cynic suspect that “conservative” criticisms of judicial review can
often be reduced to the axiom, “the democratic process should be
respected, unless it produces a result we really don’t like.”
(Reportedly, during this morning’s oral argument, the increasingly
egregious Justice Scalia likened congressional renewal of the Voting Rights Act to a “perpetuation of racial entitlement.”)

The
policy arguments for getting rid of pre-clearance boil down to the
claim that the sort of disenfranchisement motivated by racial bias that
pre-clearance was designed to combat has largely if not completely
disappeared. This may or may not be true, but it’s hard to see why
unelected judges should decide whether or not it is rather than elected
legislators.

But there’s a deeper problem with claims that America
has “moved past” our history of racial discrimination to the point
where a vigorously enforced Voting Rights Act is no longer necessary.

The
Voting Rights Act, and its equally important cousin the Civil Rights
Act, were both adopted in the mid-1960s, when, incredible as it may seem
to today’s youth, Jim Crow still flourished throughout the American
South. (My mother, who grew up in Mexico, attended the University of
Texas in the 1950s, and was deeply shocked to encounter “colored” and
“whites only” public facilities.)

As
state legislatures begin their 2013 sessions, a flurry of new “ag gag”
bills to protect factory farms from potential undercover whistleblowers
have been introduced in 5 states. This week, the Indiana Senate is
debating a proposal to criminalize taking photographs or videos inside an agricultural or industrial operation without permission.

Senate Bill 373
is the first of two ag gag bills introduced during Indiana’s 2013
session. New Hampshire, Nebraska, Wyoming and Arkansas are also considering them.

Since
trespassing is already illegal, ag gag laws can only have one clear
motive: to punish whistleblowers, advocates, and investigative reporters
who use undercover recordings to reveal the abysmal conditions in which
our food is produced. Undercover investigations have captured factory
farms all over the country abusing livestock, passing off sick cattle as
healthy, and discharging unregulated amounts of animal manure, which
the US Geological Survey identified as the largest source of nitrogen pollution in the country.

The
bill’s author, Sen. Travis Holdman (R), added a provision exempting
anyone who turns over their video or photos to law enforcement within 48
hours — as long as they do not also share the footage with non-law
enforcement, such as media or an animal rights group. But, as the Indy
Star points out,
many exposés are “undertaken precisely because the authorities failed
to do their job. Sometimes, they have spotlighted conditions that were
not illegal but were disturbing enough to inspire new laws.”

Indeed, factory farms have largely escaped regulatory and legal scrutiny. Last year, the Environmental Protection Agency abandoned
an effort to require these operations to report even basic information
like location, number of animals, and amount of manure discharged.
Meanwhile, the meat lobby’s grip on lawmakers is so powerful that the
USDA was pressured into apologizing for an internal “Meatless Monday”
last year by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Rep. Steve King (R-IA), who
claimed the optional vegetarian day was a full-scale attack on
agriculture.

A
few years ago, my world changed when I began dating a single dad whose
youngest child was a toddler. Bonding with and loving his two kids has
been the single most enriching and rewarding — and sometimes frustrating
and exhausting — experience of my life.

During the three years we
lived together, I became a de-facto stepmother. Parents, you know how
it is with 3-year-olds. The name of the game is “choice.” Either you
yield some control and decision-making power or they’ll assert
themselves in ways you might find inconvenient.

As we introduced
the little one in my life to normal routines like brushing her teeth,
washing her hands, and going to bed at a reasonable hour, we tried to
make it fun.

“Do you want to use the bubbly soap or the fruity
soap?” we’d ask her. “Do you want to wear SpongeBob or princess
jammies?” This was a much more successful strategy than simply
commanding her to go to bed.Around the same time, I began
reporting on some very scary chemical news. One by one, I’d discover the
dangers of this toxic chemical or that one. I carefully eliminated
these chemicals from my own life, replacing them with affordable and
effective alternatives.

Out went Herbal Essences, and in came Dr.
Bronner’s castile soap. And who needs a chemical cocktail labeled “aloe”
when they can easily keep an aloe plant in the front yard or their
windowsill to take care of sunburns?

But occasionally, out of
curiosity, I’d pick up Miss Toddler’s bubbly soap or princess pajamas to
read the ingredients label. Lo and behold, the kid products — which
should be the safest things in the house — were often the most toxic.

One offending ingredient in the soaps and toothpaste marketed for tots is triclosan. It’s common in anti-bacterial soaps aimed at the grownup market too — as well as facial cleanser, shave gel, lip gloss, deodorant, and even dog shampoo.

Foot
soldiers in the battle against corporate globalization and the
privatization of commons like land and water have long been aware of
Indian physicist and philosopher Dr. Vandana Shiva. An ecofeminist
pioneer, today she is best known as an outspoken opponent of the GMOs
(genetically modified organisms) being developed by transnational
biotechnology and chemical corporations like Monsanto and Dow.

Shiva
disputes the notion that patenting genes and controlling the world's
seeds, and thus much of its food supply, will better serve humanity.
Biotech companies claim their genetically engineered (GE) crops are able
to withstand threats from insects, disease, and man-made pesticides and
herbicides while making a serious contribution to feeding an
increasingly hungry world.

Such claims are straight-up
fabrications - lies - according to Shiva. GMOs, she says, destroy the
natural web of life, threaten biodiversity and the environment, and are a
scourge for human health and society.

Raised by
conservation-minded parents (her father was a forest conservator, her
mother a farmer) in the foothills of the Himalayas, Shiva was at the
heart of the original "tree hugger" Chipko movement.

After
earning a Ph.D. in "hidden variables and non-locality in quantum
theory," Shiva branched out from science and academia to environmental
activism and helping small farmers in India and around the world save
seeds - a practice that puts her in direct conflict with biotech giants
who insist their GE seeds are protected by patents.

It was at a
biotechnology conference at which Shiva had been invited to speak that a
representative from the chemical firm Ciba-Geigy (which later merged
with other companies to become biotech giant Syngenta) told her that its
goal was to control health and food by the turn of the 21st century.

"That’s the day I decided I was going to start saving seeds," Shiva says.

Edith Windsor, the New York widow at the centre of a US supreme court
legal challenge to the act that bans federal recognition of same-sex
marriage, put her case on Tuesday in a brief arguing that the law
contributes to the "pervasive history of discrimination" experienced by
gay people in the US.

Windsor, 83, and her long-term partner, Thea
Spyer, married in Canada in 2007, after Spyer was diagnosed with
multiple sclerosis. When Spyer died two years later she left everything
to Windsor, her partner of 44 years, but because the marriage was not
recognised under federal law, Windsor was required to pay $363,000 in
federal estate taxes. She requested a refund from the government but her
request was rejected because of the Defense of Marriage Act (Doma).

In
her brief to the court, Windsor's legal team argues that laws like Doma
that classify people based on their sexual orientation should be
subjected to "heightened scrutiny", a standard which calls on the court
to presume that anti-gay legislation is unconstitutional and asks the
government to provide a strong explanation for the law in question.

Windsor's
lawyers wrote: "As this court has already recognized, laws burdening
lesbians and gay men that were 'once thought necessary and proper' may
in fact 'serve only to oppress'."

The brief notes that "gay men
and lesbians have experienced a pervasive history of discrimination" and
that "as a result lesbians and gay men have confronted discrimination
at the hands of both government and private actors".

On Friday, the Obama administration
also filed a brief in the case with a similar argument that laws
targeting individuals based on their sexual orientation should face
additional scrutiny by courts reviewing them. In it, solicitor general
Donald Verrilli argued the law is unconstitutional because it violates
"the fundamental guarantee of equal protection".

The feminist writer Susan Griffin called
rape "The All American Crime" in Ramparts Magazine in 1971. She was the
first feminist to explain that men rape children, elderly and disabled
women, not just girls dressed in mini-skirts. In other words, she
challenged the belief that that rape was a sexual act, fueled by men's
irrepressible sexual drive. Instead, she argued that rape was an assault
against a woman, fueled by the desire to control and harm her, not a
sexual act at all.

While I became a professor of history at the
University of California a few years later, an elderly woman was raped
by a man who stalked the campus looking for prey. He finally found a
woman in her 90s and raped her in Davis's Central Park. (I can't find
the newspaper story, but I remember the terror he caused among the
town's women.) In 2012, a 43-year-old man raped a 73-year-old woman in New York City's Central Park and even boasted about how many elderly women he had raped. So, no, rape is not a sexual act.

Griffin
was right. Even more, we now know that rape is the universal crime. Men
don't need seductive young bodies scantily dressed to incite them to
use their overwhelming power over a vulnerable woman. Even though rape has been declared illegal in war as a means of demoralizing an enemy, the Balkan wars revealed the creation of "rape camps" on all sides.

And has anything changed? Well yes, there was a huge outpouring of protest against the rape and murder of a 23-year-old woman in India in December 2012. But after that atrocity, countless rapes followed in Timbuktu,
Mali, just weeks later. In every ethnic strife, opponents rape women as
part of the spoils of their victory. It's in the newspaper every day
with sickening regularity.

Closer to home, I recently received a
message from the Berkeley police, notifying me that the number of rapes
in Berkeley, California, has doubled during the last year. The twenty
rapes that occurred in 2011 jumped to 39 in 2012. Many of these crimes
took place near campus, where I live, and some, as you would expect,
involved alcohol and drugs, according to the local news station, KGO.
Very likely, some of these involved date rape, a term not used until the women's movement coined it.

Then
I read a story in the New York Times that women are now among the
loudest voices against gun control. They are crowding the shooting
ranges, learning how to shoot and protect themselves. Why? Because of
fear of rape, fear of gender violence of all kinds, and probably fear of
criminals as well as immigrants in the border states.

Officials
at Oklahoma State University did not go to the police with several
reports of rape or sexual assault on campus in 2011, falesly believing
that they were following procedures protecting the information of the
purported assailants.

According to a report by an OSU Board of Regents task force,
university representatives “misinterpreted the Federal Education Rights
Privacy Act.” The university believed that purported rapists’
educational records might have been involved in the case, and so, to
protect those records, decided sexual assault fell under the purview of
the school, not law enforcement:

Friday’s report cites a provision in FERPA that allows institutions to contact campus police to ask them to investigate possible crimes on campus. The report notes that members of the news media brought the provision to university officials’ attention.According to the report, OSU officials rejected that argument,
saying a different provision in FERPA wouldn’t have allowed them to
turn over educational records, including those generated in student
conduct hearings.

But that provision wouldn’t have applied in this case, according to the report. When officials learned of the incidents, no student conduct hearings were pending, meaning no such records had been created.

“OSU could have notified the police immediately after it became aware that the sexual assaults had been committed,” the report states.

The US supreme court's upcoming decision on the Voting Rights Act could let discriminatory laws make a comeback

When a black man won the White House in 2008, many in the commentariat declared the United States a "post-racial" society,
no longer hamstrung by old hatreds, freed at last from the
embarrassments of segregation – finally and triumphantly color blind.

Conservatives
have been telling themselves some version of this pretty lie ever since
Robert E Lee surrendered at Appomattox. On 27 February, we'll hear it
again when the supreme court takes up a challenge to the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
The case, Shelby County v Holder, centers on Section 5 of the VRA,
which requires that nine states with histories of discrimination
(Virginia, Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, Louisiana, Texas,
Georgia, Alaska and Arizona), and parts of seven more states must seek
permission from the justice department to change election laws. The
Alabama county argues that Section 5 is an unconstitutional infringement
on "state sovereignty", and a relic from the bygone days of poll taxes
and literacy tests.

Granted, citizens in the old Confederacy are no longer forced to say how many bubbles are in a bar of soap
before they can cast a ballot. But the last national election provides
plenty of examples of voter suppression. Florida (five counties of which
are included in Section 5) enacted a largely inaccurate purge of its electoral rolls. The people whose right to vote was challenged were predominantly (the state says coincidentally) minorities.

The
state's Republican leadership cut back the number of polling places and
reduced early voting, including the Sunday before election day, when
African American churches would traditionally organize trips to the
polls. Many, like Desaline Victor, the 102-year-old President Obama
featured in his state of the union address, had to wait in line for
hours. More than 200,000 others were unable to vote.

Texas and South Carolina
(entirely covered by Section 5) tried to institute absurdly restrictive
voter ID laws in 2012, but the Department of Justice, citing the Voting
Rights Act, shot them down. "Federal courts sided with DOJ, finding that the new rules would disproportionately affect black and Latino citizens.

Last
week, President Obama described the sequestration situation in simple,
stark terms: Keep it in place and punch the middle class in the gut. Or,
he suggested, soften the blow substantially by ending special tax
breaks for the rich.

Republicans
in Congress face a simple choice. Are they willing to compromise to
protect vital investments in education and healthcare and national
security and all the jobs that depend on them? Or would they rather put
hundreds of thousands of jobs and our entire economy at risk just to
protect a few special interest tax loopholes that benefit only the
wealthiest Americans and biggest corporations?

President Obama is recommending reducing the pain of sequestration by
raising revenue. This could be accomplished by eliminating cushy deals
that the rich and corporations have bought for themselves over the years
with lobbyist dough.

Do Republicans want to end treatment
for 373,000 seriously mentally ill adults and severely emotionally
disturbed children just to ensure that the 1 percent continue to receive
tax breaks for their corporate jets, yachts and golf carts?

What exactly Is “politically acceptable?”

So
here we are again, approaching another self-inflicted economic cliff.
This time it’s the sequester – a truly stupid idea that will result in a
mindless meat cleaver approach to cutting the budget in order to solve a
problem that’s disappearing, using the same tactics that caused the
problem in the first place. Oh, and quite possibly it will plunge us
back into a recession. What is Washington doing? Trying to fix blame, of course.

The
truth is, both Parties agreed to this uniquely idiotic idea. Yes, it
ultimately comes from the Republican’s decision to play brinksmanship
with the budget and the debt ceiling, but Democrats in general and Obama
in particular let them make debt and deficits into the all-purpose
bogeyman it has become. By failing to confront the myth, they empowered
it.

But the Republicans have backed themselves into a corner.
They’ve been clamoring for austerity for 30 years as part of their
“drown the beast” strategy, and now they are faced with a popular
backlash against austerity. Their response has been to blame Obama.
Mitch McConnell keeps saying the President hasn’t offered a politically viable
alternative to the sequester. Boehner says much the same. Even the
less rabid David Brooks has repeated this line. In fact, it’s become
one of those cascading talking points that the rightwing chants in
unison, over and over again.

The key here is the qualifiers they
use: “politically viable,” “politically acceptable,” or something
comparable. They must, because Obama has put forth a plan. More about that later.

So what, exactly, is “politically viable?”

One
would think it is defined by the will of the people. And as we just
had an election in which the people soundly rejected the Republican
platform of drastically cutting social programs benefiting low- and
middle-income Americans so that they could preserve – or in the case of
Romney and Ryan increase – tax cuts for the rich, the will of the people
is quite transparent. The recent election, exit polls and polling in
general all tell us the people want to increase taxes on the rich,
preserve the social safety net, and invest in job creation.Which
sounds something like Obama’s plan, with the exception that the
compromiser-in-chief is offering up cuts in Medicare and Social
Security.

Paul
Krugman, Joe Stiglitz, Robert Reich and other major economists have
pointed out that the deficit is not an urgent economic problem and that,
to the contrary, the economy would be helped by an increase in public
investment and harmed by drastic cuts. The Sequester would hurt the
economy, millions of people, and the country as a whole.

President
Obama has detailed the vast range of harms that the sequester would
bring. They are well-known. And they are not necessary. The president
sees the sequester, if it happens, as an enormous self-inflicted wound,
inflicted on America by a Republican-dominated House elected by
Americans.

But pointing out Republican-caused harms to millions of
people — many of them Republicans — does not sway the ultra-right. Why?
Democratic pundits say that Republicans want to hurt the president, to
show government doesn’t work by making it not work, and to protect
“special interests” from higher taxes. All true. But there is an
additional and deeper reason. Ultra-conservatives believe that the
sequester is moral, that it is the right thing to do.

Progressives
tend to believe that democracy is based on citizens caring for their
fellow citizens through what the government provides for all citizens —
public infrastructure, public safety, public education, public health,
publicly-sponsored research, public forms of recreation and culture,
publicly-guaranteed safety nets for those who need them, and so on. In
short, progressives believe that the private depends on the public, that
without those public provisions Americans cannot be free to live
reasonable lives and to thrive in private business.

They believe that
those who make more from public provisions should pay more to maintain
them.

Ultra-conservatives don’t believe this. They believe that
Democracy gives them the liberty to seek their own self-interests by
exercising personal responsibility, without having responsibility for
anyone else or anyone else having responsibility for them. They take
this as a matter of morality. They see the social responsibility to
provide for the common good as an immoral imposition on their liberty.

The
media is going sequester 24-7. Anyone who hasn’t been paying attention
to the across-the-board spending cuts about to hit this Friday is about
to have little choice. The brouhaha about the austerity bomb is drowning
out any attention to what is actually going on in the economy — which
is supposedly the point of the whole debate.

The stark reality is
the economy is still in trouble and Americans are still hurting. The
economy contracted last quarter, even before Americans got hit with the
end of the payroll tax holiday, which will take $1,000 out of the typical family’s annual paycheck. The Congressional Budget Office projects that growth will inch along at about 1.5 percent this year.
That translates into continued mass unemployment — with more than 20
million people in need of full-time work — and falling wages. The
richest 1 percent captured an unimaginable 121 percent of all income
growth in 2009 and 2010, coming out of the Great Recession. They
pocketed all of the growth in income, while 99 percent of Americans actually lost ground. That trend is likely to get worse rather than better.

Federal Reserve Governor Janet L. Yellen described the tragic human costs of widespread, long-term unemployment in an important speech this month.
Families lose their homes; divorce and depression rise; children are
scarred; skills are lost. A young generation is leaving school to sit on
the couch.

Yet most of Washington — from the newly reelected
Democratic president to the self-described insurgent Tea Party
Republicans — is ignoring this reality to focus on cutting deficits.

The
Republican Congress seems intent on letting the “sequester” take place —
the idiotic across the board cuts that were explicitly designed to be
anathema to both parties. Senate Democrats call not for repealing these
cuts, but for “paying for” delaying them for a few more months.

Why
this fixation? Deficits aren’t careering out of control. In fact, as
the Congressional Budget Office reports, in relation to the economy, the deficit has fallen faster over the past three years
than at any time since the demobilization after World War II. Calls for
cutting Medicare benefits ignore the reality that the slowing rise in
Medicare costs has already cut about $500 billion from its projected costs over 10 years compared to estimates made two years ago.

From Common Dreams:http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/02/25-1by Rob Dietz and Dan O'NeillPublished on Monday, February 25, 2013 by Common DreamsThe
World Economic Forum held its annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland last
month. The official theme was "Resilient Dynamism," a catchphrase that
makes about as much sense as the futureless economic policies trotted
out at the meeting. At least the attendees had something to ponder at
cocktail hour. The mission of the forum, on paper at least, is
"improving the state of the world." And there is clear room for
improvement: trillions of dollars of public debt, billions of people
living in poverty, escalating unemployment, and a distinct possibility
of runaway climate change.The popular
solution to these problems is sustained economic growth. In fact, the
first item of the Davos meeting's global agenda was "how to get the
global economy back on to a path of stable growth and higher
employment" The thinking is that if we could just get people to produce
and consume more stuff, then we could also pay off the debt, create
jobs, eradicate poverty, and maybe even have some money left over to
clean up the environment.

It's tempting to believe this economic
fairy tale. But if growth is the cure to all of our ills, why are we in
such a bind after sixty years of it? Even though the U.S. economy has
more than tripled in size since 1950, surveys indicate that people have
not become any happier. Inequality has risen sharply in recent years,
and jobs are far from secure. At the same time, increased economic
activity has led to greater resource use, dangerous levels of carbon
dioxide in the atmosphere, and declining biodiversity. There is now
strong evidence that economic growth has become uneconomic in the sense
that it costs more than it's worth.Maybe it's time to consider a
new strategy—an economy of enough. Suppose that instead of chasing
after more stuff, more jobs, more consumption, and more income, we aimed
for enough stuff, enough jobs, enough consumption, and enough income.

To
build a successful economy of enough, we would first need to eliminate
the "growth imperative"—factors that make the economy reliant on
growth. These include reliance on inappropriate measures of progress,
creation of debt-based money, and the use of aggregate growth as a tool
(albeit a blunt one) for generating jobs. With key policy changes, it
is possible to dismantle the growth imperative and build an economy that
works for people and the planet.

Let's start with measures of
progress. Our main economic indicator, GDP, is a good measure of
economic activity—of money changing hands—but a poor measure of social
welfare. It lumps together desirable expenditures (food, entertainment,
and investment in education) with expenditures that we'd rather avoid
(war, pollution, and family breakdown). In the language of economics,
GDP does not distinguish between costs and benefits, but counts all
economic activity as "progress."

Spring
is coming, which means we are entering the season of the regulation of
how much skin girls around the country are allowed to bare. Dress codes,
while usually regulating boys' slovenliness, tend to police girls for
how much of their bodies are visible. Anyone who's ever painted or stood
in a room surrounded by Kara Walker
silhouettes can tell you that white space is defining and when we talk
about dress codes, girls' skin is the white space we've all been trained
to ignore in these discussions. And, while everyone is in theory
affected by dress codes, girls and LGTBQ youth are disproportionately
affected by them. Challenging schools to align unexamined, traditional
dress codes to contemporary values is a tangible place to start if
you're interested in teaching kids to live in a diverse, tolerant
society. Of course, many parents are not interested.

So, what exactly is wrong with saying girls are "distracting"? I mean, everyone know this, right?

Who
gets to be distracted? And, whose distraction is central? What is a
girl supposed to think in the morning when she wakes up and tries to
decide what to wear to school? They aren't idiots. The logical
conclusion of the "distracting" issue is, "Will I turn someone on if I
wear this?" Now who is doing the sexualizing? My daughters would never
have thought these things without the help of their school. The only
people these policies worry about distracting are heterosexual boys.
When I was a teenager, there was a boy who distracted the hell out of
me. It was the way his hair brushed against his neck and an insouciant
ease with his large body. I managed just fine academically, and so can
straight boys who encounter girls they are attracted to. When have you
ever heard someone talk about what is distracting to girls or gay kids?
This idea ignores that fact that girls and LBGTQ kids exist as sexual
people. But, do you know what is distracting? Trying not to be
distracting. This framing of the problem is marginalizing, sexist and heteronormative.

In
addition, it implies strongly that girls have responsibility for boys'
responses and that boys cannot control themselves. Boys should be
insulted. People need to get a super-firm grip on the fact that girls
are not sexual thermostats for their male peers. They need to manage themselves and are fully capable of doing so.

About Me

I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.
Thomas Jefferson